Earth
by Anna Queen
Summary: ...'Perhaps, after all, happiness isn't the thing you get to once you've worked out all the answers.' Veronica and Logan grow up, a little bit.


**Earth**

They get married on a beach in St Lucia. It suits them both: it _is_ expensive but it doesn't feel it. Afterwards, they drink cocktails and stay up until the tide laps at their feet, and spend a week losing track of night and day.

If they are ever blissfully happy it isn't now, in spite of the sand and the surf and the moonlight. She's glad of that. It makes it feel like a rational decision: hard logic in the face of something momentous. It's what she'd do in any other situation.

Of course, she knows that on-and-off is supposed to end on an off, but the truth is he belongs. Belongs in her life, in her world: a piece of the jigsaw. It's not that she'd be lost without him, but she'd not be entirely whole, either.

She'd never meant to be the girl who wrote her place in the college record books by the chequered course of her romantic history. But the fact was that the more times off didn't mean over, the harder it became to walk away.

The night they graduated college they found their way back to each other, a great clichéd reunion of drunken yearning and reminiscing under a sky full of stars. Waking up the next morning her head had throbbed but her heart had felt strangely light. When she'd told him she should get home and he'd said stay, she hadn't answered straight away.

"Come on, Veronica, one last day of decadence, what do you say?"

The "last" had cut swift and sharp across her.

"Are you going somewhere?"

"I thought you might be."

She shook her head. "Nowhere anytime soon. I start the PhD program at Hearst in two months, so Neptune and me, we're stuck with each other for a while yet. What about you?"

"You know what, I was thinking I might actually use this degree thing and get - what's the word – a job? All I know is if I stay here much longer they'll be renting me out with the room."

Maybe because her heart still felt light enough at that moment for her to be reckless with it, she'd said something out loud that she'd probably never meant to share.

"Do you know what I've always wanted to do with you?"

He'd smirked a little at that, propped himself languidly up on his elbows. "That's more like it."

"Get out of here. The road trip to end all road trips. We'd stay in cheap motels and solve small-town crimes in sleepy backwaters, put things right in one place and then move onto the next."

He'd leaned in, then, and kissed her so long and hard that she'd stood three minutes in the corridor outside his door afterwards, wondering if it had been goodbye.

That evening as she'd sat, preoccupied, waiting in for her dad, there'd been a knock on the door. She'd known even before she opened it who it was; played the scene in her head more times already than she'd cared to admit.

"Hey. So I'm here about that two months you had going free?"

In the event, their Great Escape lasted all of a week. Perhaps words come easier after days filled with nothing but freedom and fresh air, but during long evenings they'd talked their way into a future too tantalisingly real to run away from. So they'd headed home to give this thing between them another chance, a little older and wiser this time.

Three years they shared an apartment in downtown Neptune while she worked on her thesis and he worked shifts to keep himself out of trouble, pretending to be a real boy. She knew her dad approved: sometimes, she'd get home and find him already there and on his way back out, as if he and Logan had some boys' night in planned and she was cramping their style.

And then out of the blue one day one of Aaron Echolls' old associates had turned up with a business proposition.

The day Veronica collected her PhD she'd looked round the room and thought she was probably the only girl there with a boyfriend who'd kept her going through endless drafts of her thesis by reading it back to her in place of sweet nothings and calling her "doctor" in their most intimate moments. She doesn't use the "doctor" even now, partly because it still makes her blush. But it had hit her, too, that it marked the end of something: a chapter in her life that she's both relieved and reluctant to complete.

She asked him to move out two months after he took the position as head of the Lynn Echolls Trust. For three years they'd played a game of love, taking turns to cook and watching late-night TV together. Perhaps, after all, they'd gotten too old and wise to keep playing.

He left the same evening. She'd spent the night picking his clothes out from hers where they lay strewn on the bedroom floor, wondering what had happened to the boy who'd smashed a lampstand and once upon a time drunkenly declared their love epic. She wondered, too, what that boy would say if he knew the scattered clothes weren't indicative so much of wild nights of passion as they were of a lack of storage space.

Now she has a walk-in closet of her own. It was the closet that made her say yes to the house when secretly she wanted something smaller. She never can tell her dad what exactly went on inside the closet that made her change her mind.

It was Wallace, in the end, who was responsible for bringing the two of them back together. She thinks sometimes that Wallace brings out a better side to Logan than she does. When she'd let Logan go from her life it had been a kind of solace to her, knowing he and Wallace still saw each other. Sometimes she'd ask after him, as if she didn't already know everything a one-time PI with a vested interest might.

When Wallace had handed her the ticket, she'd told him he'd have to ask someone else. 

"I've put more than seven years between me and high school," she'd protested, "Schmoozing 09-ers to get what you want? Not in my world, not any more."

Wallace had fixed her with his best disparaging look. "It's a party. It's one night. It's for a good cause."

She'd opened her mouth to reply but he'd cut in. "What are you afraid of, Veronica? And when do you turn down free food?"

And so the two of them found themselves attending the launch party of the Lynn Echolls Trust at the invitation of Logan Echolls.

He'd crossed the room the moment they arrived. "You came," he said, and she knew it wasn't Wallace he was talking to.

In spite of the lilies and the lights, the langoustines and the Louboutins, she'd found herself right back at Alterna-prom, only she knew that if she ran this time there would be no coming back.

She didn't run.

Six months later she'd promised to have and hold from that day forwards, and even with the sun in her eyes she'd caught the light in his.

Making up her mind had been easy, in the end. She'd spent years learning the art of sticking to decisions she made about Logan: when it came to it, the biggest decision she had to make about him felt like one she'd already made.

For all the familiarity, she knows this is different. Life, uncharted. She'd gotten used to working towards endings: now she has to move forward without a horizon. But a year-and-a-half on from that sun-soaked week in the Caribbean, she's found a kind of rhythm in the ease and swell of her life, and it's enough.

So here she is: Veronica Echolls, society wife. Ms Mars, Professor of Criminology. 

Veronica Mars aged seventeen could have been Veronica Mars, federal agent at twenty-seven.

But the girl in the short white dress and flipflops in her wedding photos is laughing in a way that the hard-bitten Veronica of old never would.

Perhaps, after all, happiness isn't the thing you get to once you've worked out all the answers. She's found a place in the world that she doesn't always have to fight for: a place that is hers not because she's broken her way into it, or been broken herself, but because it's grown around her, and grown with her. Her life will always be something she lives out; but she's come to be grateful, too, for the moments she can just live in.

And then she finds out.

Truth has surprised her more times than she can count; she knows it can hit hard and it can hit unexpectedly. It's never stopped her seeking it out. But faced with this truth that throws up only ceaseless questions, she finds herself backing away.

For three weeks she pretends not to know. Sometimes she finds herself standing in front of one of her classes and it feels like a dream, like she's not there at all but somewhere else, looking on. She doesn't think her students notice; if some of this semester's papers are anything to go by, noticing isn't something any of them are in much danger of doing more than they need to.

Something inside her feels small and crumpled, like the great expanse of world before her that she had started to revel in has suddenly become too big. Deep down, she longs to speak to her dad, but she knows she has to talk to Logan first. 

She tells him the night of the Trust summer ball. He spends the evening talking to other women: it's his way of letting her know he loves her, she knows. Other women want me, I want you, as if somehow that makes his love for her worth something more.

She worked that out long ago, and yet when she tells him she does it because she wants some of him back, because these last few weeks she's felt strangely lost. The night is still hot; outside, nothing moves. The contrast to a few hours before is so marked that everything is lulled by it, and in the quiet neither of them say very much.

When she finally says it out loud it sits on the silence, stifling the air between them until she looks up at him, and he looks back at her, and she feels an irresistible hope surge up inside her that catches her off guard.

It's only later, lying next to him and listening to the rise and fall of his breathing, that she feels all the warmth of his boyish glee cool in her. For a little while she'd let herself feel safe, and sure; now she's left restless and alone. She needs so much more from him, if she knew how to ask. She's not sure that she does.

It doesn't matter. If she has to be, she can be strong enough for both of them. It's what she does; it's the reason she can be with him and make it work. She tells herself this, even as she's reminded, oddly, of a morning long ago when her world collapsed from under her and he made her pancakes for breakfast.

One day she gets in from work and stops on the stairs, a sudden hopelessness catching up with her at the end of a long week.

When did she start thinking about her life this way, like the stuff of gossip columns and tabloid headlines? She'd known being with Logan meant taking on the weight of his past, just as being with her meant the same for him. But it's the future that sits heavily on her now: a future that has to rewrite their past. 

Can they do this? When her model for a mother is the woman she asked to walk out of her life? When his father's legacy to him was a blow-by-blow action replay of his own wreck of a childhood? 

She's frightened, for the first time in so long. She remembers why it was him she married, because sitting there on the stairs with a heap of ungraded papers in her lap and a rush of unchecked tears running down her face, she wants him, so much.

She hears the door click, the bound of his step down the hall and she looks up. He stops four steps below her, leaning into her as he rests his hands either side of her.

"I love you, Mrs Echolls," he says, kissing her knees. He reaches out and wipes away the tears with his thumb, tracing it down her nose until he reaches her mouth. And she smiles a little bit, in spite of herself, as she wraps her fingers round his.

"Veronica, we'll be OK." He tips her face towards him, gently. "We'll all be OK. We really will."

He climbs up beside her and pulls her to him, kissing the top of her head.

And as he holds her, she lets go, and believes him.


End file.
